Movie was less than "Shutter" inducing

Asian horror films are a passion of mine.  I will freely admit that about 85% of them are really bad.  There are a handful of them that are quite rewarding like "Ringu", "The Eye" or "A Tale of Two Sisters".  Many of these movies have been remade here in the states where they are destroyed.  There is a select few that are as good or even better than the original, but for the most part they are utter crap.  The remake of "Shutter" was ok, but not very great.  So I was hoping the original was decent at least.  Unfortunately, this was not to be.




"Shutter" tells a complicated story about a a photographer named Tun and his girlfriend, Jane.  At the beginning of the movie they are coming home from a night out when they accidentally hit a young woman on the road.  From that point on Tun's photographs seem to have ghostly images in them.  The secret behind all of this is probably the coolest part of the film.  But we don't get that until the last 30 minutes of the movie.  The rest of the movie is a tangled web of scares and story that seem to wander far too much for it to be too interesting.  The last act in the movie seemingly comes out of nowhere.  I would have liked to have a bit more integration of the idea earlier in the story.  It is a slow burn with great moments of spookiness, just not exactly structured in a way I found enjoyable.

The scares are fairly standard Asian horror fare.  There is the requisite dead girl with long hair and creepy eyes.  She even crawls out of and on things in a weird way to imply she isn't from this world.  What they DO get right is a tension.  Even bad Asian horror can build up tension at certain moments.  You even know something is going to happen, but what exactly is always new.  Rarely in this film does the scares repeat themselves.  In fact, the payoff at the end of the film is really cool and pretty much worth the rest of the films errors.

If you have some time, it is available on Netflix watch instantly right now.

6 out of 10 stars